eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

May 2016

05/29/2016

When a home is missing too many good memories, it becomes a house. If the trend continues, it becomes a storage facility and eventually a morgue. It is a place where the bodies of dead people sleep. The ability to create a space for memories of connection to occur at more frequent intervals is a gift that not everyone has within them or in the circle of their intimates. A house does not need to be beautiful in the Home and Garden Sense to acquire memories of people connecting. I remember writing a poem once that was about just such a house. A few lines come to mind.

Insured for fire, Insured for storm Though neither showed their visage A weather pattern straight from Sears In a home insured for image

In E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, physical homes are domestic spaces that have the personalities of the people who inhabit them. On the one hand, they can be manifestations of holistic connection. They radiate connection between family members, between present and past, between the family and the outside world, between humans and nature, and between individuals and their inner selves. Other homes in the novel can represent the absence of all these things. One can walk into them and know that the people living there do not relate to one another in anything but a superficial way. They can evoke a profound discordance between nature outside and people within. They keep their shutters closed to nature to keep out the flowers so as to keep out the bees. They betray no living connection to the history that brought them into being.

In Howard’s End, the Schlegel sisters and their home are counterpoised against the Wilcox family and theirs. The Wilcoxes represent all the business and attention to money that is required to buy a house (or many) and keep them standing, but they have no knack for making homes of their properties. Forster calls the sort of domestic life the Wilcoxes carry on “a civilization of luggage.” The pursuit of happiness for them has become the “pursuit of stuff.” Houses are somewhat like warehouses of material substitutes for love. The Schlegels are romantics who have little practical business sense but know how to infuse the shell of a Wilcox house with life. The Schlegels must move out of their home for lack of the financial wherewithal to have owned it in the first place. Within a day of “Camping out" in an abandoned Wilcox house, they have recreated a home where human wounds can be tended and souls stitched back together.

The Wilcoxes are unconnected people. The Schlegles are connected.

And yet, like a yin/yang symbol, the Wilcoxes have a “Schlegel” in their midst in the form of Henry’s first wife, Ruth while the Schlegels have a Wilcox among them in the form of the younger brother, Tibby.

“Just as some people cease to attend when books are mentioned, so Tibby's attention wandered when 'personal relations' came under discussion."

That is absolutely, as you shall soon see, a Wilcox family trait. Henceforth, with that caveat being made, the Wilcoxes and Schlegels can be seen as archetypes. The Wilcoxes have money coming in. The Schlegels have inheritances but no present income stream. They are blessed with the wherewithal to focus their attention on their holistic emotional, cultural, intellectual, and relational endeavors but they understand that without those investments, their material lives are insecure. Here is how E.M. Forster describes the Wilcox tribe:

“They avoided the personal note in life. All Wilcoxes did. It did not seem to them of supreme importance. Or it may be as Helen supposed: they realised its importance, but were afraid of it.”

“All his affection and half his attention—it was what he granted her throughout their happy married life.”

Charles Wilcox is not someone who considers the inner life of a marriage to be as vital to his soul as his rubber investments in Africa. The novel begins with a brief aborted attempt by two members of these families to connect with each other but their respective world-views and internal lives are altogether too powerful to make it last. Here is how Forster describes the brief moment of mutual attraction between Helen Schlegel and Paul Wilcox:

“That was "how it happened," or, rather, how Helen described it to her sister, using words even more unsympathetic than my own. But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it—who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. To Helen, at all events, her life was to bring nothing more intense than the embrace of this boy who played no part in it. He had drawn her out of the house, where there was danger of surprise and light; he had led her by a path he knew, until they stood under the column of the vast wych-elm. A man in the darkness, he had whispered "I love you" when she was desiring love. In time his slender personality faded, the scene that he had evoked endured. In all the variable years that followed she never saw the like of it again.”

Unfortunately or fortunately, Neither Helen nor Paul have the ability to transcend their profound differences despite the psychic forces within them reaching out for the other’s balancing strengths.

"In other words, they belong to types that can fall in love, but couldn't live together. That's dreadfully probable. I'm afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another."

And thus, the novel revolves around the short but vital meeting between Charles’ mother, Ruth Wilcox and Helen’s sister, Margaret Schlegel who manage somehow to find a place between their respective family cultures to communicate and negotiate an alliance between these two worlds to their mutual benefit.

Here is a good way to describe Paul Wilcox.

“Uncle Ernst replied, ‘To my mind. You use the intellect, but you no longer care about it. That I call stupidity.’ As the haughty nephew did not follow, he continued, ‘You only care about the things that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the following order: Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful; imagination, of no use at all.’”

Invert the above to describe Helen. She lives life, feelings and intuitions first. She does things and asks questions later, or not at all. She is a risk taker (and thus both benefits and pays).

“Her thought drew being from the obscure borderland. She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy. It is necessary to prepare for an examination, or a dinner-party, or a possible fall in the price of stock: those who attempt human relations must adopt another method, or fail. 'Because I'd sooner risk it,' was her lame conclusion.”

Here is how Forster describes Helen’s response to the Romantic Era music of Ludwig Beethoven

“For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in a major key instead of in a minor, and then—he blew with his mouth and they were scattered! Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death! Oh, it all burst before the girl, and she even stretched out her gloved hands as if it was tangible.”

As if it was tangible. To the Wilcoxes, bank statements are real. Rubber plantations are real. The things that can be bought with money are real. To Helen, Beethoven’s goblins are real. (If you do not understand that statement, maybe you have never heard Beethoven or maybe your name is Wilcox). Things like music and art and imagination are what is real about life to Helen Schlegel. Wilcoxes no doubt simply wonder why people pay money to listen to music. When Forster describes Henry Wilcox, he tells us that he was the sort of person who rarely heard his own feelings about anything. When asked about his first impressions of his own second wife, he can’t really remember “for his mental states became obscure as soon as he had passed through them.” Henry Wilcox is like a man who lives his life with a one way mirror between his wife and he. She understands the importance of the internal. He only sees the importance of the external. She sees into herself and him. He seeing into neither.

“He supposed her ‘as clever as they make them,’ but no more, not realizing that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul . . . .

“It was hard-going in the roads of Mr. Wilcox's soul. From boyhood he had neglected them. ‘I am not a fellow who bothers about my own inside.’ Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos . . .”

The third family that Howard’s End deals with is the family of Leonard and Jackie Bast. Jackie is a former prostitute. Leonard is a lowly clerk discouraged with the knowledge that he will never have the resources to live the life of culture that the Schlegels value and that the Wilcoxes can afford. “Oh, to acquire culture!” Leonard exclaims,

“Oh, to pronounce foreign names correctly! Oh, to be well informed, discoursing at ease on every subject that a lady started! But it would take one years. With an hour at lunch and a few shattered hours in the evening, how was it possible to catch up with leisured women, who had been reading steadily from childhood? His brain might be full of names, he might have even heard of Monet and Debussy; the trouble was that he could not string them together into a sentence, he could not make them ‘tell,’ . . . The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more.”

Leonard is wired to live in Helen’s world of ideals but he was born into the wrong station in life for such a longing to be anything but a tragedy. He was not born into aristocracy. Meeting Leonard causes Helen to reflect on the fickleness of fates that give some people lives counter to their inner selves.

“One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas. Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.”

"Money pads the edges of things," said Miss Schlegel. "God help those who have none."

“You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It's only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin."

"I call that rather cynical."

"So do I. But Helen and I, we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most of the others are down below the surface of the sea. The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can.”

What Ruth Wilcox helps Margaret to understand is that there is a need for those who focus on money if those who focus on art and literature and music are going to live well for long.

"Then you ought to!" said Margaret. "Discussion keeps a house alive. It cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone."

"It cannot stand without them," says Mrs. Wilcox”

On this very observation, Margaret seems to pivot. She seems like one who suddenly understands that someone in her tribe will have to sacrifice something to get what is needed from the other. “They [the Wilcoxes] led a life that she could not attain to “ she says,

“—the outer life of ‘telegrams and anger,’ which had detonated when Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other week. To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization. They form character, too; Margaret could not doubt it; they keep the soul from becoming sloppy. How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?

"’Don't brood too much,’ she wrote to Helen, ‘on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.’"

Margarete Schlegel intends to reconcile these two classes of people. And that is what this book is about. Can such people as Helen Schlegel and Henry Wilcox be reconciled? Can they live in the same home? It is like asking if Donald Trump could be Bernie Sanders’ running mate.

Are you a business oriented person who focuses on money and financial stability? Do people like Helen attract you or drive you nuts? Are you an art loving heart-on-your-sleeve sort? What is it like to consider living with an accountant sort? Both Margaret and Ruth Wilcox understand that the world needs people who can help others connect, and connection (the rainbow bridge Forster calls it) is the central theme of the novel.

“Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire.”

The great question is, can this ambassador of the connected world and her family actually stay married to this money godded shrivel-souled CEO and his family without killing him as she sets out to save him? (I knew a couple who existed in the same exact space that Henry and Margaret do in this novel and she eventually had to give up or go mad.)

Here is Henry, pontificating about the poor without having the slightest sense of connection to them:

“A word of advice. Don't take up that sentimental attitude over the poor. See that [Helen] doesn't, Margaret. The poor are poor, and one's sorry for them, but there it is. As civilization moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch in places, and it's absurd to pretend that any one is responsible personally. Neither you, nor I, nor my informant, nor the man who informed him, nor the directors of the Porphyrion [Insurance Company], are to blame for this clerk's loss of salary. It's just the shoe pinching—no one can help it; and it might easily have been worse."

The next line: “Helen quivered with indignation. “

All he can say about her natural ability to connect and empathize with the struggling poor is this: "By all means subscribe to charities—subscribe to them largely—but don't get carried away by absurd schemes of Social Reform.”

And what about small farmers trying to stay connected to the earth? Here’s as sympathetic as Henry Wilcox can get:

“The days for small farms are over. It doesn't pay—except with intensive cultivation. Small holdings, back to the land—ah! philanthropic bunkum. Take it as a rule that nothing pays on a small scale.”

How about his ability to connect within the context of friendship? Is there a ray of hope for him there? Is he capable of close intimate friendships? No.

“He had not the knack of surrounding himself with nice people—indeed, for a man of ability and virtue his choice had been singularly unfortunate; he had no guiding principle beyond a certain preference for mediocrity; he was content to settle one of the greatest things in life haphazard, and so, while his investments went right, his friends generally went wrong. She would be told, ‘Oh, So-and-so's a good sort—a thundering good sort,’ and find, on meeting him, that he was a brute or a bore. If Henry had shown real affection, she would have understood, for affection explains everything. But he seemed without sentiment. The ‘thundering good sort’ might at any moment become ‘a fellow for whom I never did have much use, and have less now,’ and be shaken off cheerily into oblivion. Margaret had done the same as a schoolgirl. Now she never forgot any one for whom she had once cared; she connected, though the connection might be bitter, and she hoped that some day Henry would do the same.”

She hoped Henry would do the same. Ever hoped that someone would change? Ever been married to them? Contrast the relationship that Margaret has with her husband Henry with the one that she has with her sister:

“This conversation made Margaret easier. Their inner life was so safe that they could bargain over externals in a way that would have been incredible to Aunt Juley, and impossible for Tibby or Charles. There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use. Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come at all promises a fairer future.”

“And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind—the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things. Explanations and appeals had failed; they had tried for a common meeting-ground, and had only made each other unhappy. And all the time their salvation was lying round them—the past sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future with laughter and the voices of children. Helen, still smiling, came up to her sister. She said, ‘It is always Meg.’ They looked into each other's eyes. The inner life had paid.”

The Schegel sisters are everything that they might want in partners because they know how to share - how to connect – with themselves, with others, with nature, with each other. “I know of things they can't know of, and so do you,” Margaret says to Helen of her husband and in-laws.

“We know that there's poetry. We know that there's death. They can only take them on hearsay. We know this [the Wilcoxes empty house] is our house, because it feels ours. Oh, they may take the title-deeds and the door-keys, but for this one night we are at home."

This is the point. Equipped with inner knowledge and knowledge of each other, Margaret and Helen can make a home anywhere, in a matter of hours. They can bring domestic bliss to a building and have it humming with love in a matter of an evening. The Wilcoxes on the other hand, have many houses, and none of them are ever homes. And thus, Margaret soldiers on with Henry Wilcox and his brood of Visigoths trying to help them put their money to better psychological use. Trying heroically to get them to “make connections.”

Traveling in a motorcar with Henry’s son Charles one day, the car hits a small child’s cat. Charles can only comment that it would have affected him if it had been a dog. Margaret jumps out of the moving car when Charles refuses to stop to attend to the child and her dead pet.

“No doubt she had disgraced herself. But she felt their whole journey from London had been unreal. They [The Wilcoxes] had no part with the earth and its emotions. They were dust, and a stink, and cosmopolitan chatter, and the girl whose cat had been killed had lived more deeply than they.”

Margaret begins to understand that the Wilcoxes cannot be saved from their condition in spite of themselves. They can only be loved as they are in the hopes that they will come to understand the parts of life that they are missing. She sets her mind to listen to them. To connect with them even though she does not like them, even if it is on nothing but a superficial level.

“She heard him [Henry] with interest. Her surface could always respond to his without contempt, though all her deeper being might be yearning to help him. She had abandoned any plan of action. Love is the best, and the more she let herself love him, the more chance was there that he would set his soul in order.”

Margaret determines to remain a connected person in this Wilcoxian world of disconnection. It is a mission that her sister Hellen simply could never pull off. “How wide the gulf between Henry as he was,” writes Forster, “and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be!” For Helen, a relationship with the chauvinistic, materialistic, bombastic Henry Wilcox is out of the question, no matter how much she loves her sister. Margaret however is resolute.

“She must remain herself, for his sake as well as her own, since a shadowy wife degrades the husband whom she accompanies; and she must assimilate for reasons of common honesty, since she had no right to marry a man and make him uncomfortable. Her only ally was the power of Home. The loss of Wickham Place [the Schlegel’s rented home] had taught her more than its possession. Howards End had repeated the lesson. She was determined to create new sanctities among these hills [one of the Wilcox estates].”

“She noted the dishes and the strips of red carpet, that outwardly she might give Henry what was proper [a fancy wedding]. But inwardly she hoped for something better than this blend of Sunday church and fox-hunting.”

The climax of the book will come when she concludes that maybe there is no hope of reform in Henry.

The second climax comes when Leonard Bast concludes that he will never be allowed to taste the sweet cheese that is the life of the mind and the soul that he longs for. "And that's to be life!" says Helen to him with a catch in her throat when Leonard tells her that he is giving up his dreams.

"How can you, with all the beautiful things to see and do—with music—with walking at night—“ [referring to Leonard’s earlier description of an all night walk in nature he had taken].

"’Walking is well enough when a man's in work,’ he answered. ‘Oh, I did talk a lot of nonsense once, but there's nothing like a bailiff in the house to drive it out of you [Leonard and his wife had been evicted]. When I saw him fingering my Ruskins and Stevensons [Leonard’s books], I seemed to see life straight and real, and it isn't a pretty sight. My books are back again, thanks to you, but they'll never be the same to me again, and I shan't ever again think night in the woods is wonderful.’"

"Why not?" asked Helen, throwing up the window. "Because I see one must have money."

"Well, you're wrong."

"I wish I was wrong, but—the clergyman—he has money of his own, or else he's paid; the poet or the musician—just the same; the tramp—he's no different. The tramp goes to the workhouse in the end, and is paid for with other people's money. Miss Schlegel the real thing's money, and all the rest is a dream."

By the time we are done with Howard’s End, we find ourselves, with the author, longing for lives of connection (or at least I do). We understand that both the rich Wilcoxes and the poor Basts suffer without that connection. We sense, with Henry, eventually through the fog of his inability to see connection, how impoverished we are without it. Howard’s End, the house, is an extended metaphor for all of England where love will be required to give all classes a home in a place that “has wonderful powers” – that “”kills what is dreadful and makes what is beautiful live."

Forster, writing in 1910 was living at the cusp of that great canyon of disconnection that was WWI. He was living in an age of urbanization and imperialism and racism and class consciousness and chauvinism. He saw disconnection everywhere and he saw the forces of disconnection advancing on every front. He saw the loss of beauty and nature and connection to the land. He saw growing international discord. He saw rising class tensions. He saw increasing rancor between men and women. His book is a warning and a hope.

“"Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong forever," she said. "This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house [Howards End where the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and the Basts eventually make a home] is the future as well as the past."

Question for Comment: Which of the following characters do you most relate to?

Helen Schlegel: The “hopeless romantic” who just cannot tolerate people who live their lives as though “things” were the most important realities.

Henry Wilcox: The person who prefers to focus one’s energies on success and the acquisition of financial and material security.

Margaret Wilcox: The ambassador between the two above camps, constantly trying to get both camps to understand the value of the other.

Leonard Bast: The frustrated soul who wishes that he could spend more of his life pursuing the life of the mind, the heart, the imagination but who is “stuck” working overtime in a dead end job, married to someone who will never be able to value anything beyond survival.

05/27/2016

The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools? asks a question and then provides Newark, NJ as a mechanism for answering it. Why Newark? Because by self-admission, it had one of the most depressing educational systems in the country and was given a $200,000,000 gift to lift it out of the quagmire it had become. Newark had been a place where, “for decades, education seemed incidental to the purpose of the school district.” And “reformers saw in districts like Newark an opportunity to prove that systems built around unions and large public bureaucracies were themselves an obstacle to learning.”

What would a $200,000,000 corporate grant do for the educational system in your nearest challenged city?

The initiative in Newark was to be led by a bi-partisan triumvirate of state, local, and corporate executives who would, they hoped, appoint a progressive, no-nonsense reformer to the post of superintendent. These four individuals are featured at the top of the front cover of the book: the governor of NJ, Chris Christie, the Mayor of Newark, Corey Booker, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Superintendent of the school system, Cami Anderson.

I think this is a book that both conservatives and liberals should read. I suspect that both will think that the author is a partisan for the other side because she doles blame and praise out fairly equitably and what sort of partisan in today’s political climate ever admits that their party is complicit in any way when some initiative fails. The Prize pulls no punches. It is harsh with the love-children of both right and left. It helps us to understand that simply “not spending money” on the education of disadvantaged children is not a solution but, it takes those to task who argue that simply spending money is solution enough. In the end, it is not how much money you spend so much as how much you spend wisely.

“One of the cruel ironies of Newark’s schools,” Russakof argues, “was that throughout their long decline, the district often appeared on paper to be in perfect compliance with all requirements.” Ultimately, any system that has perfected the art of looking like they are actually doing something when they are not will not benefit when given the opportunity to make itself look like it is doing more. In the case of Newark’s $200,000,000 windfall, distant stake holders, posturing for acclaim and higher political offices began hiring consultants to spend the money that they hoped to take the credit for spending. Without the voices of those at the bottom being heard, the voices of those who wanted a “piece of the action” elbowed their way in and absconded with most of the money by the time it was all spent.

“Despite Bookers public promises of ‘bottom up’ reform led by the people of Newark, he quietly hired a team of education consultants – none from Newark …”

“Organizers did not know that Booker and Zuckerberg already had agreed on an agenda.”

Ultimately, less than half of the $20,000 per student dedicated to the betterment of education in Newark reached district schools to pay teachers, social workers, counselors, classroom aides, secretaries, and administrators – “in other words, the people who actually delivered education to children.” “District money gushed and oozed in myriad directions,” says Russakof.

“More than eighty percent of the Newark Public Schools budget went to salaries and benefits, which was typical for a school district. Still, many positions were unnecessary, created years earlier and still locked in by state civil service rules and seniority laws. …”

Newark’s teacher’s union lobbied to take out some of the reform money in retroactive pay raises that they had not received in a number of years (fair enough). They also insisted that there had to be guarantees for seniority. Otherwise, they argued, the school district would just lay off more experienced, i.e. More expensive, teachers under the guise of reform so as to save money. If students left the district schools to attend charter schools, there would be fewer needs for teachers but if teachers were to be laid off, it could not be simply merit that determined their fate. A senior teacher at one school, if laid off, was entitled to take the position of a less senior (but possibly better) teacher at another school. As Russakof puts it,

“New Jersey unions kept the seniority protections intact, fearing that administrators would simply let older more expensive teachers go if they could, regardless of their abilities . . . Anderson could not fire the worst teachers unless they were the junior ones. . . . This meant that the district had no way of shedding leftover teachers. New Jersey’s tenure law included strict seniority protections. If Anderson laid off all eighty excess teachers, those with the longest tenure could bump union ones in any school, without regard to merit …”

And so, teachers were sometimes paid for not teaching. Incentivizing incompetence in the name of reform. Half the grant donation to Newark’s education system went to paying teachers and retroactive raises. And then came new consultant fees and payoffs to administrators. “Bonuses were paid to principals and assistant principals in schools with the greatest academic need,” Russakof tells us. This is understandable as these are not easy jobs. But then “more than half of those who received bonuses left within a year of getting them.” Some educational goals were incentivized – one would get a bonus for reaching specific targets. But it was only a matter of time before the targets were drawn to encompass things that had been accomplished. Like telling a U.S. Congressman that he would get a $5,000 bonus for keeping the budget under the debt ceiling and then defining the debt ceiling a few weeks before the award was handed out.

Administrators began hiring friends who were consultants and additional staff to make their own work-loads manageable. Isn’t this what the money was for? Why should an administrator work till late at night when a clerk could be hired to take on some of the work-load? Administrators have families, don’t they?

Meanwhile, the best teachers … the ones who cared, continued to burn out. I can so totally feel their pain. Teachers who care don’t get to just hire administrative assistants to grade papers and give feedback. They DO have to stay at work till sundown if they want to do their jobs well. And eventually, because teachers have families and needs, they began to move into the charter schools where money was actually more often spent on things like curriculum, books, aides, support staff and children. Not all charter schools, Russakof is clear to state. She will only go so far as to say that “Well run charter networks got more money to their schools than the district did … Charters were structured to more easily deliver money to classrooms than was the district.”

And why were charter schools more likely to be structured to get money to children and to be run well than district schools? One can surmise that attendance at them involved more parental effort and concern and that a parent dedicated enough to get a child into a charter school continued to be dedicated enough to see to it that that charter school served the child. One needs to remember that voices need to be heard but they are never heard when they are not spoken.

In closing, it is important to note that educational success is complex. It involves money, teachers who care, and administrators who see to it that resources go primarily to the mission not the missionaries. Poverty and hardship and stress in the community will be translated into educational challenges. Children’s nervous systems are not designed in such a way as to provide for academic success when they are in trauma mode from birth. You cannot spend money on an educational system alone if the students in the seats are dealing with massive instability in their homes. And to the extent that poverty exacerbates the likelihood of traumatized students, education expenditures need to be seen in a wider context of poverty reduction measures.

The takeaway from this book is to be wiser in the use of public money. It is to dedicate oneself to the proposition that public funds are no solution to any problem in and of themselves. If a public agency of any sort wants more support, it should have to demonstrate, in terms of real lives, not paper and data, that it has been a faithful steward of public trust thus far. Want ten talents? Show us what you did with one.

Question for Comment: Look around. Of all the various governmental levels and agencies, who can you say that you trust to accomplish actual results should they be given more money to do so?

05/21/2016

The Well Diggers Daughter is a lovely French remake of a 1940 "Vichy" film set during WWII that threatens with the dark and stormy clouds of Thomas Hardy fatalism. In the end, decency prevails over coincidence. Characters have their flaws, to be sure. Vices match up with virtues and there are times when every character looks worthy of some misery. Still, Ill fortune pulls out of its dive, revealing itself only to be a pilot doing tricks at the air show. Happily, everyone winds up with who they belong with (i.e. who they want to belong with by the time all is said and done).

One can only wonder if this is what happens in “real life.”

As an aside, there is a good deal of patriarchy embedded into the plot of this film. When the central character is a man in 1940 raising six daughters who eventually has a grandson, though illegitimate, the impact on the plot is not subtle. The film has a subtext of Talibanish daughter-owning son-worshipping running through it. If one were to put turbans on the principle male characters, the story would still work.

05/17/2016

The goal of this television series is to get people to think about climate change as a contemporary issue. For that reason, it enlists contemporary news, television, and movie personalities to interview contemporary scientists about contemporary places and events where climate change is having an impact NOW. The producers want us all to think of climate change as a “”us-here-now” issue rather than a “them-there-then” issue and they largely succeed.

Over the course of nine hours, you will get a chance to experience fires and deforestation in Indonesian national parks, to speak to Syrians who trace the present civil war to climate change induced drought, and to speak to Texans who are being forced to relocate due to water scarcity in the American Southwest. You will experience forest fires in California (with Arnold Schwarzenegger), coral experimentation on a disappearing Island in the South Pacific, ice core drilling in Greenland and Andean glaciers, methane gas recording in Colorado, bread riots in Egypt, domestic crisis in Staten Island and Far Rockaway, NY, heat waves in Los Angeles, flooding in Pakistan, and wars over water in Yemen. You will hear from scientists, business owners, home owners, pastors, researchers, environmentalists, oyster fisherman, politicians, lobbyists, social workers, doctors, coroners, skeptics, refugees, and a host of people who have been or are about to be impacted by the seemingly inevitable climate change apocalypse.

The series tries to treat people who are not on the climate change train yet respectfully without lending too much credence to their objections.

One senses that there is a certain struggle going on over who will control the amygdala’s of the public mind (i.e. the part of our brain that determines what our greatest threat at the moment is). Should our primary fear be that we will not have a job? Not get into heaven? Or not have water (or conversely, have too much)?

For most of the people you will meet in the nine hours you will spend watching this riveting documentation of climate crisis, climate change is an even more fundamental hazard than terrorism, liberal agenda’s, or soteriology. Had American Plains Indians had access to television, I can imagine them making a documentary like this somewhere around 1763 or at least by 1836. There would be an episode on the Pequots, the Wampanoags, the Seminoles, the Narragansets, the Abenaki, the Mohawks, and the Cherokee. Some interviewees would be telling the story of how they had lost everything. Some would be telling of how they were losing everything. Some would be expressing their concern that they were about to lose everything. Scattered among the interviews would be a few people saying “Yeah but, we get pots and knives and guns and medicine and better blankets.” Others would be saying “We know that we should be resisting them but if we do, they will just give weapons to our enemies and what will be the point in the end anyway?” “there is no resistance anymore,” they would say, “there is only intelligent accommodation.”

No doubt there would be a few eyewitnesses who would accuse the producers of fear mongering by saying, “I have met white people and all the whites I have met say that they have all the land that they want already.”

By the time I was done with this entire series, I was not entirely sure what the message was. Was it “climate change must be stopped!” or “climate change must be prepared for!”

Should I stop driving my car to work?

Or buy farm land in Quebec?

Or invest in water resources?

I know a few things. One, I will not be moving to southern Pakistan or the Jersey shore. Two: I may have to get used to living in Vermont and being called a “southerner.”

Question for Comment: What has been your personal perceptual journey relative to the subject of climate change? What forces have propelled you or inhibited you as you have sought to make up your mind whether or not to worry about it?

On October 26, 2013, Boston Red Sox third baseman, Will Middlebrooks, was called for obstructing Allen Craig of the St. Louis Cardinals in the bottom of the ninth inning of a World Series game and cost the Red Sox the contest. Almost immediately, I logged in to Wikipedia to see if I could discover the exact wording of the Obstruction rule because at the time it happened, Middlebrooks was actually between two bases that Craig had already run (2nd and 3rd). He was not anywhere close to the 3rd base to home baseline where Craig should have been running. I discovered that in the Wikipedia article, someone had already gone in and edited the article on the obstruction rule to suggest that the umpire had made the right call.

I immediately changed the paragraph to reflect my belief that he had made the wrong call. I suspect that I had violated a key directive for anyone working on Wikipedia pages, (NPOV) Neutral Point of View. But I did not believe myself to be at the time. The call had clearly been erroneous. Within seconds of my edit, someone else had gone in and taken out my sentence and replaced it with a Cardinals-friendly interpretation of the rule and the event. I immediately counter-struck. My revision did not last long. Within minutes there were scores of edits and a full-fledged edit war was on.

The Book, Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration, seeks to address a variety of issues where what I and the rabid fans of St. Louis were experiencing that October day in 2013 occurs between cultural points of view. Can you guess what some of the most contested topics on Wikipedia are? Here are a few: “Jesus” “Muhammad” “911” “Homeopathy” “global warming” “Israel” “capitalism” “evolution” “Barack Obama” “Christianity” “abortion” etc. It should come as no surprise that the numbers of contested edits are different depending on which language version of Wikipedia you use. That is, people who speak different languages tend to argue more about different things. You probably will not find too many edit wars over American baseball games in an Persian language Wikipedia. You will however see a good deal of controversy about the 2006 Lebanon War in the Hebrew and Persian Wikipedia versions.

When comparisons are made between different Wikipedia language sites, one can find that different cultures care about different things. Some argue about religion more than politics or provide more information on science than on disasters and celebrities. Some focus on global issues and some focus on more local issues. Some care about sports. Some don’t. Some Wikipedias use significantly more sources in documenting their narratives. Some provide a great deal of information on the main article page. Others are brief on the main article but provide more detailed information on linked pages. Even concepts like “bias” and “neutrality” can be defined somewhat differently in different cultures. In short, when people construct knowledge collaboratively, different cultures do it differently. Etc.

One thing that all linguistic versions of Wikipedia share is a significant leaning towards male authorship. The numbers are different in different language versions but the percentages of edits contributed by women rarely exceeds ten percent according to a Jan 2011 article in the New York Times. How this shapes the knowledge that we all base our understanding of the world on when we access Wikipedia is an interesting question. One has to wonder, would a Wikipedia written by nine women for every man look different? Would our resulting knowledge of the world be different?

One of the more interesting chapters of the book dealt with Wikipedia copycats in China. China, like Iran, Tunisia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, blocks citizens from using Wikipedia. Two companies in China have created Wikipedia facsimiles that are highly regulated. Contributors to the English language Wikipedia volunteer their time and efforts simply to contribute something to the global intelligence. In the Chinese copycats, contributors can win prizes for the work that they contribute. The Chinese copycat, Baidu Baike, claims all the copyrights to the material that people contribute and thus actually makes money from the labors of those who they reward with prizes. “Interestingly, both Baidu Baike and Hudong use the ancient titles in imperial exams or ranks of nobility in imperial China as their titles for different ranks of experience or credits.” Working for titles. Sounds like Versailles and the Cub Scouts. These Chinese knockoffs strictly censor the articles that get posted on their site. The content is not policed by fellow users as is generally the case with English Wikipedia. Sensitive political subjects are locked down to prevent dissent. Articles related to the companies themselves are similarly positive and locked down. That is, in China, you will go to “Wikipedia” to find out what the government and the internet company that the government allows to do this work want you to think.

There will be relatively few Wikipedia wars between Cardinals and Red Sox fans over the application of rules on Baidu Baike or Hudong.

Question for Comment: NPOV (Neutral point of view) is the ideal that Wikipedia strives for. Articles are supposed to report facts backed by evidence and allow readers to determine perceptions and value judgements. “We report. You decide” as they say. Thus, even articles about serial killers will have to insert moral judgements by quoting people who have them. For example, here is how the article on ted Bundy concludes:

“Ted Bundy died in the electric chair at Raiford Prison in Starke, Florida, on January 24, 1989. Biographer Ann Rule described him as "... a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after."[3] He once called himself "... the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet."[4][5] Attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, agreed. "Ted", she wrote, "was the very definition of heartless evil."[6]

The article itself takes no particular moral position other than not including anyone who said that they admired Ted Bundy for his ruthlessness.

Do you think it is a good thing that we as a society are learning to look at the world from a NPOV?

05/15/2016

Inequality. To begin with, one needs to remember that there are a variety of ways to calculate the term itself. Are we talking about inequality of income or inequality of assets or inequality of buying power or inequality of opportunity or inequality of consequential happiness? One could be income-rich but relaxation and relationship-poor. One could be phenomenally wealthy but live in fear all the time of losing it. One could be poor in income but rich in property … or health … or joy. I sometimes think that it is a mistake to always talk about equality in terms of money. Just because it is easier to count, does not mean that it is of greatest importance to the real end.

This book is both a confirmation and a challenge to the Bernie Sanders movement that is so afoot at the moment. On the one hand, it makes it clear that within countries today, there is a vast chasm between the richest and the poorest. But then it also makes the case that there is significant wealth inequity between countries as well. When Bernie speaks of rights and when he speaks of the appalling inequity between rich and poor, why stop at internal inequities? Why, by the same argument, would any inequity between any two people in the world be tolerated? If all Americans were to magically be endowed with an equivalent salary every year and yet that salary was many times more the salary of someone in Mexico, would Bernie be satisfied? Should he be?

What is so just about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. when there would be a corresponding loss of jobs in developing countries where those jobs are even more essential to survival? Is this not simply a game of favoring one group of needy people over another and asserting that the cause is a moral one in absolute terms? Why not simply ague that CEO’s give higher wages to the workers in developing countries as that would be a greater service to the cause of decreasing global inequity?

The thesis of this book is that over the past few decades, the inequities between countries has been closing while the inequity within countries has been widening. Thus, while the differential between the poor countries and rich countries on average has been leveling off somewhat, the inequality between the richest people and the poorest people in those same countries has been exacerbated. In Bourguignon’s words, “Those poor countries are catching up to richer countries but poor people within countries are falling further behind richer people in those countries.”

Someone who seriously cared about the problem of global inequality, would have to address the differentials that exist across borders it seems to me then.

“The richest 10% of Ethiopians live on an average of $2000 per person per year, still very much below the standard of living of the poorest 10% of the French population. Of course, some Ethiopians are better off than the poorest French or perhaps even the average French person, but they make up only a handful.”

The richest 10% of the world had 90 times more wealth than the poorest 10% in 2008. Think about that. “In absolute values, the poorest 600 million in the world have an average of $270 in disposable income per year, while the richest 600 million have a standard of living above $25,000.”

Should this be regarded as a greater injustice than the inequities that Bernie Sanders promises to address within American society? By the same arguments used to confiscate and redistribute the wealth of the American rich to the American poor, would we not also need to confiscate and redistribute the wealth of all Americans to almost all Ethiopians? What would contain the argument to our own borders? It seems a legitimate question.

Bernie makes a great deal about the fact that America is far behind all the other industrialized nations in terms of equality, Scandanavia in particular. And he is right. In Scandanavian countries, Bourguignon argues, the richest ten percent make about five times more than the poorest ten percent. In Germany, the richest 10% make about seven times more than the poorest10%. In the United States, the developed country with the highest inequality, the top tenth makes about fifteen times what the bottom tenth makes. The richest 10% averages a $70,000 income, while that of the poorest 10% was averaging $4500. “In the United States, the richest 10% receive 40% of total primary household income, but possess 71% of total wealth. For the richest 1% the numbers are 15% and 35% respectively.” Thus, to “Scandanavianize” American incomes, you would have to essentially cut the top tenth’s wealth by a third and redistribute the proceeds to the bottom tenth just for starters. If you wanted to go back to 1979 you would need a tax rate of 67.5% on the incomes going to the top 1%. And you would still have a lot of redistributing to do with the middle 80%.

But it is not just wealth. Its jobs. Bernie has argued that American politicians have been selling out the American worker for decades now, giving American jobs to Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, and so on. Bourguignon tells us that since 1980 the share of manufacturing in total jobs has been halved in the United States, more than halved in the UK, and slightly less in France. That is, what Bernie has said about American manufacturing is true in all the developed countries. It is this movement of jobs, not just in America, but everywhere, that has much to do with why a few people are reaping more and more profits. Owners have found people to work at what amounts to the wages of servants. One can clearly imagine a movement that brought those jobs back but at what cost to the workers of these developed countries? Would we simply lower the inequity within American society only to increase the inequity between our society and others? Or would the higher American wages simply lead to higher consumer prices and inequity derived by different means?

Honestly, what would the environmental and economic impact of all these new manufacturing jobs be? Would we simply return to the days of acid rain and higher consumer price inflation?

Clearly, the availability of workforces elsewhere has had much to do with the stagnation of the minimum wage in America and the death of unions. Bourguignon estimates that 20%-30% of the wage inequity in the United States has been caused by the expansion of outsource labor alternatives. By denying American business the right to export jobs and import cheaper goods, you could hypothetically gain some equality back. But that assumes that these companies would surrender the profits that they have grown accustomed to making and that they would willingly fire all their foreign workforces to rehire the domestic ones at higher wages.

Bourguignon is French and notes that in his country, the government taxes and redistributes about 15% of the income of the richest 20% to the rest of the population. This is 45 times more redistribution than what we see at the global level! Were Bernie to be as radical in his plans for redistribution as France, one could still see him going much much further using the same logic that he presently uses to get us to be more French. Or at least one might want to know just why he would not go much much further. Would Scandavia’s 5:1 ratio between rich and poor suffice?

Needless to say, to go back to where I began, some people would dismiss the issue of inequality altogether. They would argue that, provided everyone in the society has enough to live on and sees his or her welfare improving over time, why worry about whether progress is faster at the top then at the bottom or in the middle? The author of this book would counter that problems get real when talent, brains, ambition, and ideas coming out of the struggling classes are left undeveloped for lack of financial wherewithal to get education and start businesses.

Opposing that concern is the real worry that when the wealthy feel themselves to be “overtaxed” they will move to other environments where the taxes are lower “as is notoriously the case with tax havens.” “The mobility of financial assets is real,” he says.

Somewhere in the middle is a sweet spot that will be different for everyone.

Question for Comment: Is it a virtue to be generous with other people’s money? Is it a vice to bring advantages to others if in doing so, you advantage your own situation even more?

05/14/2016

Mediterranea reminded me of the film In this World, a 2002 portrayal of what the journey of an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan to London felt like to a young man on the journey. Mediterranea follows the story of two young men en route from Burkina Faso to Southern Italy where they hope to improve their lives.

In both films, the journey involves an obstacle course of treacherous challenges (deserts, eploitations, hazardous transports, water crossings, thieves, borders, legalities, and uncertainty). In both cases, refugees arrive to find that the challenges continue. They discover that the world that they saw on television is not necessarily open to them. Indeed, to some extent, the good life that they have seen people leading on television is predicated on the existence of exploitable populations like they represent. I could not watch what happens to these young men without thinking about the way that Victor Frankenstein’s monster was created by the interaction between human need and a society that could not meet that need with human compassion.

The film portrays an uprising of what seems like senseless civic violence that would cause any sane person to say “Why are we letting these people into our society?” and yet the characters themselves are more the creations of rejection than cause.

This is a slow moving film with little narrative structure to tell you what is happening. You simply watch the story unfold and make most of the meaning yourself.

Question for Comment: There is a temptation to think that one can offer a second class citizenship to people who come from situations that are much worse and that they will be grateful for the opportunities they are given. I wonder though. Does human nature work like that?

Recently, Peter Louras, the mayor of Rutland, Vt. Decided to invite a community of Syrian refugees to come and live in the Rutland area. Immediately, people in the community began filling in the gaps in their knowledge (can one call it a gap when they know nothing?) with their own preconceptions about who these people would be (either good or bad). I think it was Sir Francis Bacon who said, “The understanding must not therefore be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying.”

“One method of delivery alone remains to us; which is simply this: We must lead men to the particulars themselves, and their series and order; while men on their side must force themselves for awhile to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.”

No one knows if these people are doctors or farmers, Muslims or Christians, native born Syrians or Palestinian refugees, potential Republicans or Democrats. They are people. That can be surmised. They do not want to live in Syria as it exists today. That is understandable.

The documentary, The Letter: An American Town and the Somali Invasion is a story of the way that communities can be split over their perceptual differences. The letter referred to in the title was a letter written by a former mayor of Lewiston who encouraged the Somali elders to dissuade more Somalis from coming to the city. The letter was widely published and set off a firestorm of support and protest. While the conflict eventually drew in white supremacist groups who had their own reasons for opposing Somali migration, the letter itself stuck strictly to economic concerns. Here was basically the gist of the letter:

“To date, we have found the funds to accommodate the situation. A continued increased demand will tax the City's finances. This large number of new arrivals cannot continue without negative results for all. The Somali community must exercise some discipline and reduce the stress on our limited finances and our generosity. I am well aware of the legal right of a U.S. resident to move anywhere he/she pleases, but it is time for the Somali community to exercise this discipline in view of the effort that has been made on its behalf. We will continue to accommodate the present residents as best as we can, but we need self-discipline and cooperation from everyone. Only with your help will we be successful in the future — please pass the word: We have been overwhelmed and have responded valiantly. Now we need breathing room. Our city is maxed-out financially, physically and emotionally.

I look forward to your cooperation.”

Laurier T. Raymond, Jr. Mayor, City of Lewiston, Maine

It is an age old question. Are a group of struggling people morally obligated to help a group of people in even more dire straits? To what extent does the fact that I have unmet needs excuse me from helping those with even more unmet needs?

The irony is that Vermont has a long history of being reinvigorated with immigrants – from Scotland, from Ireland, from Greece, from Italy, from Poland, from Quebec, from Wales. Families came to work in the slate quarries, the marble quarries, the granite quarries, and on the railroads. And in each case, whatever made the immigrants seem different, turned out to be of a rather minimal consequence. Within a few years, young people from Vermont were marrying them and starting families.

As for me, I am looking forward to meeting them. And I hope Rutland’s experience of the process of welcoming them is somewhat less vitriolic than Lewiston’s experience with the Somalis. I hope that they can soon be contributing to a place that they can come, in time, to love as much as Vermonters today do.

Question for Comment: How does your own felt sense of need impact your willingness to extend compassion?

05/07/2016

I have been told that Citizen Kane is one of the great movies of all time but I have to think that this must have something to do with various film related innovations more than it has to do with acting or sheer force of message. I guess I personally never felt myself moved by it. In the end, it is a film that suggests that the pursuit of happiness should never be reduced to the pursuit of stuff. Charles Foster Kane has the money, the wife, the palace, all the influence, the connections, the toys, the power, the freedom, and the power a man could want but when he dies, he dies longing for the last single simple pleasure he’d ever had as a child. When all is said and done, he was never happier than he was in the very moments before he inherited everything.

Perhaps Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane is a theatrical parable illustrating Jesus’ famous warning to us all, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul.”

I will let others rave about the genius of the movie’s direction or script or special effects or lighting or cinematography or costumes, or innovative storytelling structures.

Question for Comment: Has the trajectory of your life been towards a happiness you did not have as a child or away from it? How do you explain that?

I have written several reviews about books and movies dealing with the 2008 financial crisis and they all seem to shed new light on different facets of the man-madeness of the catastrophe. 99 Homes may well be one of the most intimate and dramatic of the tales I have seen spun thus far. The central characters in the film are introduced to one another in the course of a forced home eviction in Orlando, Florida. It has to be one of the most intense and well-acted scenes that I have seen in some time.

Homeowner, Dennis Nash loses the home that he shares with his mother and young son to a ruthless and conscience deprived real estate broker by the name of Rick Carver. (I sort of like the way that the victim’s name (Dennis Nash) has the sound of “gnashing of teeth and the villain’s name (Rick Carver) just sound like a person who slices up meat for a living. Over the course of the movie, the victim comes to work for and then learn the skills of the Florida real estate market in the dark days of 2010 when millions of people were losing their homes to scrupulous and unscrupulous banks alike. Dennis’s arch is a slow drawn down deal with the devil in which he offers his soul to get his house back.

The director does an excellent job of portraying a previously hard working and honest single dad being caught and drawn into a spider’s web of corruption and greed. Based on hundreds of hours of research and interviews with all the various players that brought about the suffering of millions, the film serves as a treasure trove of discussion material for an ethics or economics class. What is clear is that the crisis provided a once in a life-time opportunity for shark-minded individuals willing to coin the lives, homes, and vulnerabilities of others into gold.

Over the course of the film, you can earn all manner of ways to cheat or bully your way into wealth in a time of national economic crisis. If you are a bank, have someone in your system tell a borrower not to pay a few month of their mortgage. Just don’t put that in writing. IF you are a bank’s real estate broker, you can bank some extra money by pretending that you are an owner of a house who left said house in perfect condition in exchange for a “keys for cash” benefit (look it up). You can also disconnect the air conditioning unit or pool pump and take a picture of the spot where the missing equipment was, then charge the bank that owns the house for “replacing” the same equipment that you removed. You can have post-dated paper work notarized to legally abscond with property. You can bamboozle elderly people with dementia into loans they can in no way afford. You can go hunting for homeowners in financial crisis to exploit. You can literally go into empty homes and steal appliances. You can solicit insider information about public highway construction to steal advantages on your competitors.

The opportunities for illicit gain at the expense of over-extended families, banks, the Federal government, tax payers, and investors are virtually endless.

I think what is important to see from the movie is just how silly it is to assume that there is a line between good and evil that can be drawn between the rich and the poor in a crisis like this. It only takes a matter of days for the homeless Dennis to become a crook (and a wealthy one) as well. He takes the tricks he learns from Rick and elaborates on them, at first, with the intention of getting his house back but eventually with the intention of getting as much as he can out of the free for all of pain. Ultimately the difference between Rick and Dennis, as we discover, is not a difference of nobility verses corruption. It is a difference of degrees and limits. As it turns out, Dennis is capable of conspiring to commit levels self-centered behavior even beyond what Rick imagines doing but Dennis cannot actually follow through without guilt. That is the difference. One is capable of unlimited sociopathic behavior and the other is not.

It makes me sad to know that I live in a world with these sorts of people. People who can feel deep pain and use their experience to justify inflicting it to avoid more.

Question for Comment: There is a big debate about who was to blame for the misery of millions of homeowners and investors. Some like to blame the people who took out bigger loans than they should have. Some like to blame the people who gave those loans. Some blame people for not regulating themselves. Some blame government for not regulating them. Some blame the government for rewarding banks for giving loans to undeserving people. Some blame the banks for loaning the money and then cynically betting that those same people would not pay up (by insuring against default). Some blame the accrediting agencies for giving AAA ratings to tranches of toxic mortgages. Some blame the investment banks for paying accrediting agencies for those over0inflated ratings. Some blame investors, blindly looking for profits without work. Some blame companies who paid workers so little they felt that they had to borrow to get ahead. Who do you blame?